Praying Dangerously: Radical Reliance on God

Rating:
Summary: Maturing into Prayer
Review: "Praying Dangerously" is not for the casual practitioner who seeks solace in God's benevolence. The consideration of prayer that author Regina Sara Ryan puts forth will challenge all of your preconceptions. She rips away the covers that keep us like small children. What her book demands is a radical recognition that we are not in control. She invites us to pray dangerously, not for what we want, but for what God's will asks of us. "Praying Dangerously" cites unusual yet noted sources such as the Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff whose principles of work on self have influenced many great spiritual traditions. She also cites the examples of Philip and Daniel Berrigan in their willingness to put their prayer into action.
This book is not for the faint-hearted. It is dangerous to read, and for that reason, all the more appealing.

Rating:
Summary: Praying to Live
Review: "Praying Dangerously" is not for the casual practitioner who seeks solace in God's benevolence. The consideration of prayer that author Regina Sara Ryan puts forth will challenge all of your preconceptions. She rips away the covers that keep us like small children. What her book demands is a radical recognition that we are not in control. She invites us to pray dangerously, not for what we want, but for what God's will asks of us. "Praying Dangerously" cites unusual yet noted sources such as the Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff whose principles of work on self have influenced many great spiritual traditions. She also cites the examples of Philip and Daniel Berrigan in their willingness to put their prayer into action.
This book is not for the faint-hearted. It is dangerous to read, and for that reason, all the more appealing.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling, thoughtful, occasionally iconoclastic
Review: In Praying Dangerously: Radical Reliance On God, Regina Ryan draws upon her more than twenty-five years of studies in contemplation and mysticism as practiced in the religious traditions and lives of great women from Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Sapphism in order to reveal an age-old and universal tradition of prayer as an expression of a radical and total reliance on God in the face of a secular world that can range from the seemingly indifferent to the actively hostile. Included are "dangerous prayers" from Jesus, Simone Weil (a French philosopher and mystic), the Sufi Saint Rabi'a, Tibetan teacher Chagdud Tulku, and others. Praying Dangerously is compelling, thoughtful, occasionally iconoclastic, and highly recommended for serious students of religion and spirituality.

Rating:
Summary: Praying to Live
Review: Regina Sara Ryan's book Praying Dangerously calls to my heart. Ryan, a former Roman Catholic nun and modern mystic, encourages me to open myself to what she calls "transformational prayer." In calling me to "pray dangerously," this book invites me to consider the possibility that God's will is nothing more--nor less--than life as it is, embraced fully and passionately. Ryan establishes this context in a poem that opens the book: "Let us say Yes, again and again and again./and Yes some more./Let us pray dangerously,/the most dangerous prayer is Yes." That great Yes, said "again and again and again," has the power to crumble all the edifices we have carefully and painstakingly constructed to keep life out. In praying dangerously, Ryan says, we "dare to pray our real heart's desire . . . we dare to ask for something we are totally unprepared to receive, because somewhere in our hearts we know that this is what we were created for." This book has lifesaving potential in the truest sense of the word, and I highly recommend it.